frenchmajesty

Hey, OP here. I view it like this: if you were to take all technical people on the market for launching a startup and plot them on a distribution to find the "valuable in early stage" subset, you would find that 35% are good enough to get a startup off the ground. They don't need to be extraordinary programmers, just good enough but with a lot of drive.*

However, for non-technical folks that are on the market, the distribution is worse. Only the top 10% ~ 15% actually have sufficient abilities to pull it off. The remaining fall into the archetype I wrote about here.

The caliber for what's in the market is skewed thus the technical person has to be a whole lot more picky than the other way around to avoid ending up with a dead weight.

[*]: This excludes specialized skills like Deep Learning or chemical bio-engineering, etc...

The point I maybe did not stress enough on is the relationship aspect is two folds:

- Have ability to gain hard-to-obtain relationships in the beginning

- Have ability to grow the pace at which you gain those over time

It the beginning it will give you the money to play the game long enough (ie: customers and angel investors). In the short term it help tremendously in deal-making, fundraising, enterprise sales, hiring superstar employee. In the long term, you can broker insane deals like OpenAI convincing Microsoft to invest $10B and bet their AI future on you or get acquired.

PS: Microsoft is now backtracking out of that situation, but Altman convincing them to get in bed in the first place is very impressive.

This is true! I argue here that the right business co-founder who drives long term financial success to the company is super rare and super valuable. The problem is the average one you'll run into at a networking event cannot deliver on that.

They are much more "I give the ideas and I want to keep 90% equity and you shut up and listen to me because I'm the CEO" guys.

You make a good point. The shrinking headcount is not necessarily tied to mass-firing. It's more likely tied to +10M newly trained engineers entering the job market every year, but only 50 positions being opened.

Over time, with each recessions, headcount will shrink at some companies, and will not grow back to pre prior levels. Over time, the line trends downwards

Great website! I signed up. I found a bug: I cannot input new emojis in headlines or description.

Sounds like a very fun project! Did you get to run it in the real-world and see how it performs?

What's your outdoor camera/network setup also?

Hey HN,

I worked on a fun LLM project last year where I attempt to make them actually good at engaging on social media.

I end up shutting down the project due to challenges with the Twitter API (thanks Elon) but I thought there would be value in codifying my learnings on the experience.

I appreciate anyone's thoughts/comments/criticism on how I built the system and how it could have been made better.

Hey, congrats on the initiative!

How you can make this more useful is by improving the messaging on your site. I looked at your hero section and I had no idea what your software does, who it does it for, why it does it and why should I care.

Since the hero section did not grab my attention, as a web visitor, I had 0 interest in investing more time/energy into reading the rest of the page to find the thread of relevancy. So I closed the tab.

Without the additional context you've put here on HN, I would have no idea what Pitch Forge is about.

Here's how I would rewrite it.

> Hero

Heading: Generate a pitch deck for your startup that gets you funding, fast

Subheading: Our AI is trained on the best decks to create a narrative that will have investors *begging* to meet you

> How it works?

1. It takes less than 5min

2. You get an E2E product from script, to powerpoint, etc...

3. Our narrative will 10x your positioning and speed up funding journey

> Why us?

1. First-time founders struggle to raise and it kills their businesses

2. The first point of contact is usually an intro or a deck. If deck isn't compelling enough, investors won't take meeting. No meeting = no check.

3. By improving your pitch, your will get more meetings. More meetings = more checks etc....

This is already I meaningful step-up. Now I know exactly what your software does (helps create fundraising pitch decks), who it does this for (startup founders, probably first-timers), why it does it (no money kills businesses), why should I care (I should care if I want to raise money from investors and I want my business to not die)

Very cool project! I worked on something similar some time ago and tried to see if I could bring it to market.

Back then (2022) the sentiment is most artists hated AI because they felt it violated their and other artists ownership rights based on how they are trained.

I also found those open-minded wanted much more precision over output than could be delivered with image-gen.

What brought you on to build this and what has your conversations with end users been like?

If you are fortunate enough, put your kid in private school where smartphones tend to be banned in elementary and sometimes up to middle school.

Beyond that, I don't intend to give my kids a device until they are 10. (Heavily restricted smart phone) and won't be allowed to social media until they are 13-14.

This is a more reasonable take. A single bad app launch cannot be the sole cause of a company falling apart to the point where they need to fire the CEO.

Boards are typically loyal to their CEOs (if the stock and revenue are performing well). They'll never fire a CEO who's coming out of a double-digit percentage growth last quarter.

Thus, the reason he fell out of the boards' favor is the low performance primarily and this was the last straw indeed.

Gig work is the dirt underbelly of the economy:

> Enough demand that it can generate revenue, not enough revenue that it creates incentives for high-loyalty structure -–which is what you do when you care about your employees and want to keep them working for you.

If Uber loses one driver, there is a thousand that would gladly replace them and get paid same day, in cash, pre-tax at a higher hourly rate than they can get in the job market (Amazon warehouse, Fast Food, etc...), with a lot more control of their time.

How do you compete? The companies know and have no incentive to hire.

Meanwhile, if legislation is passed to force them to do it, they're likely to dramatically cut driver headcount to keep their already shitty P&L healthy and will cause 100s of thousands to lose their main income source and a 1000x increase in costs for consumers. (Bad outcome for all parties involved)

As it stands the economics of that business model are too messed up for a good path forward to exist.

Site is bugged and giving a 500 Internal Error.

Interesting but I don't think the app is the only reason. The main reason is really the strong declining sales since last year.

As CEO of a public company you get about 3 quarters down before you're out.

Very interesting piece. Thanks for sharing!